Jaffa, an Israeli city in flux

The 4,000-year old port is experiencing a cultural regeneration, but as the bohemians, boutiques and bistros move in, the secular city is striving to preserve its down-to-earth charm.

At sunrise in Jaffa, the familiar skyline dotted with mosques, churches and palm trees has a new background of towering cranes. As the Mediterranean metropolis of Tel Aviv spreads south, high-rise buildings are being built in Jaffa to cope with the overflow.

It was not always this way. Just more than a century ago, Tel Aviv was nothing but sand dunes, while Jaffa has been a major port city for around 4,000 years. Once considered a little “Jerusalem by the Sea”, modern Jaffa is being transformed into a hip hive of art galleries, theatres and restaurants. But as the bohemians, boutiques and bistros move in, you can still find small hummus restaurants, fresh fish stalls, family-run bakeries and an old flea market selling inexpensive antiques, Persian rugs and shisha pipes. Like Jerusalem, Jaffa is a place where Arab, Jewish and Christian cultures genuinely intertwine, but here diversity unites rather than divides.

Four thousand years earlier

Jaffa, called “Joppa” in the Bible, is said to be founded by Japheth, the son of Noah, and came to prominence during the reign of the Israelite King Solomon around 950BC. An attractive port for trade, Jaffa was conquered many times, including by the Assyrians (701BC), the Persians (586BC), the Hellenistic Empire (382BC) and the Romans (around 30BC), who eventually destroyed most of the city. Much of what remains today dates from the later Byzantine, Arab and Crusader eras, though the underground Old Jaffa Visitors’ Centre displays some excavated remains from Hellenistic and Roman times.

An important site for early Christianity, the rooftop of the House of Simon the Tanner (currently closed for renovations is said to be where St Peter had his dream to convert gentiles to the new faith. Old Jaffa’s most prominent building, St Peter’s Monastery, is a stunning Baroque Franciscan church built in the 1890s on the ruins of the Crusader citadel.

The city was part of the Ottoman Empire for more than 400 years, briefly interrupted in 1799 by Napoleon. In 1820 a Jewish khan (guesthouse) was established by an Istanbul rabbi and Jaffa became a gateway for boatloads of Jewish immigrants. The port became famous for its warehouses of Jaffa oranges, grown in what was then Palestine and exported all over the world.

The Arab-Israeli conflict in spring 1948 forced the majority of Jaffa’s Arab residents to flee, and during the 1950s Old Jaffa became a retrogressive crime area nicknamed “The Wasteland”. Most of the remaining Arabs moved to Ajami, a neighbourhood that was also the setting for the eponymously named 2009 Oscar-nominated film.

“Jaffa was a typical Arab city of 70,000 people with dancing halls, radio stations and theatres until 1948,” said Igal Ezraty, co-founder of the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa. “Afterwards only 5,000 people were left and it took 50 years to recover from this trauma. For 50 years there was no theatre or culture in Jaffa.”